Handheld light field cameras, also called plenoptic cameras, have become more prevalent in the commercial marketplace. Such cameras employ a lens array to capture 4D light field information about a scene. A 4D light field describes radiance along rays in empty space and a light field camera samples this field. A popular feature of handheld light field cameras is the ability to refocus images after they are captured. This may be done for example through synthetic aperture photography where a subset of the light field samples are integrated to approximate a view of the scene that would be captured by a camera having a finite aperture. By warping the light field before performing this integration, one can focus on different planes in the scene. This multi-focus image information available from a light-field camera adds depth information providing a new layer of interactivity to conventional still photo images confined to 2D.
Currently, light field image data may be stored in a variety of formats as the data is the basis for a computational photography model from which an image at a particular focal distance for display is rendered. Depending on the rendering algorithms employed, a light-field camera file may be of a proprietary format and be many times larger than a conventionally compressed 2D image for a given resolution. As such, multi-focus (multi-focal) image generation may be computationally intensive and/or require proprietary technology limiting the audience. Accordingly, techniques and systems for extracting and storing multi-focus image data in a compressed standardized format would enable a larger marketplace for the creation and sharing of such image data.